Innovation in Higher Education: Lessons Learned from Creating a Faculty Fellowship Program

Abstract

This concluding essay offers reflections on core components of the faculty fellowship program, its outcomes and results, and program design and administration. Amid the current calls for reform in legal and other professional education, the lessons we learned and perspectives we gained during this fellowship program may be relevant to any faculty members and university administrations that are seeking to create more effective and engaged professional and graduate school programs, whatever may be their subject-matter discipline.

Program Conception at RWJF

When the Strategic Vision Group conducted a needs assessment in 2009 to look at gaps for advancing the field of public health law for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), leaders in public health practice, legal counsel to public health organizations, and academics with expertise in law and public health identified three areas of need: attracting new lawyers to public health careers, strengthening faculty and public health law curricula, and building working relationships among lawyers and practitioners in public health within states. Specific public health law experiences and needs gathered through a national sample of state and local public health officers and their counsel¹ provided additional fellowship recommendations. Responding to these needs, one of the authors (Kaufman) worked with staff at RWJF to design and pilot five fellowship programs, of which two focused on faculty.

Kaufman and RWJF staff originally conceived a faculty fellowship program, which ultimately emerged as “The Future of Public Health Law Education” program that is the subject of this supplement issue of JLME, as a one-year experience for ten professors of law within law and public health schools that would include: an intensive two-week on-site professional development experience focused on effective teaching, public health practice, and self-discovery; connecting fellows to schools of public health and strong state/local/tribal health departments; providing them tools and examples of curricula through a resource library; and periodic contact with institute faculty and mentors for 11 months following the institute. We expected fellows to create a course or courses, clinical experiences, or externships in public health law practice to be offered at their schools and to share these among the cohort and with others through an online resource library. To improve the potential for curricular change and sustainability, RWJF also required engagement of the fellows' deans.

Armed with these ideas, we then searched for leadership to bring the ideas to life. During interviews with leaders in public health law academics, interviewees consistently recommended two leaders: Charity Scott and Diane Hoffmann. They agreed to work together, with Scott directing the program and Hoffmann focusing on engaging the deans.

Program Development

Like creating a quilt from bits and pieces of fabric, we formed a program team² of Georgia State University (GSU) law faculty and staff, RWJF staff, and consultants to create a fellowship program from the sketchy initial ideas and recommendations, a process that took 18 months before the kickoff in July 2014 to the year-long fellowship program with an intensive 10-day summer institute in Park City, Utah. The program team undertook planning for the summer institute and fellowship program against a backdrop of principles of adult learning to maximize the fellows' learning and to model methods and tools for teaching public health law. Hopefully, the institute's agenda,³ which implicitly incorporated these principles, would encourage the fellows to model them for students at their home schools. Many of these principles have been articulated in the classic text on adult learning by Malcolm Knowles and others⁴:

Learners' need to know: Before adult learners will learn something, they often need to know why they need to know it.⁵ Learners need to see how the educational activities are relevant to their lives or careers. The program team knew at the outset of the summer institute what the fellows' initial project plans were, and so we could incorporate activities and workshops that would have direct applicability and relevance to their curriculum projects.

Learners' self-concept: Adults are autonomous and self-directed, which creates a self-concept of being responsible for their own lives and decisions; they can resent or resist situations which feel like impositions of others' wills.⁶ The program team incorporated opportunities for the fellows to establish their own learning goals at the outset of the summer institute and to revise them over the course of the fellowship year. We also encouraged the fellows, perhaps more than they had done previously in their teaching, to let their students take more responsibility for determining their own learning objectives and outcomes and for designing some parts of the new courses as they evolved over the semester.

Role of learners' experiences: Adults bring a wealth of prior experiences to any educational activity, so emphasis should be on experiential techniques that tap into these experiences, such as group discussions, simulations, and problem-solving and peer-helping activities.⁷ The summer institute would be designed to model these and other experiential-learning methods in nearly all of its teaching formats,⁸ and fellows would be encouraged to adopt them as appropriate for their own curricular projects.

Readiness to learn: If they understand why they are learning something, adults come ready to learn it.⁹ The program team hoped that the summer institute would leverage the fellows' readiness to learn (evidenced by their wanting to be in the fellowship program) into genuine enthusiasm for new ways of thinking about and engaging in teaching.

Orientation to learning: Adults are life-centered in their learning, meaning that they learn new knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes most effectively in the context of real-life situations.¹⁰ The summer institute took advantage of the local Park City community for many of its learning activities, and the program encouraged the fellows' development and use of field trips, community partnerships, real-life case studies, and simulated problem-solving exercises for their own students.

Learners' motivation: While adults can be responsive to extrinsic factors (e.g., rewards in the form for grades or raises), intrinsic factors (e.g., increased personal happiness or satisfaction) can be more powerful motivators to learn new things.¹¹ The program team was fortunate to be dealing with a highly intrinsically motivated group of fellows at the summer institute, who were breaking new ground in legal and public health education simply because they wanted to and thought it was important to do so.

Overall, the program team designed a summer institute and fellowship program that could reflect these principles for a student-centered model of teaching and would encourage a shift by faculty from the traditional role of teacher to the more effective role of facilitator of students' learning.¹² We also sought to create a community of practice among the faculty fellows, their faculty mentors and deans, the program team, and other institute participants, academic experts, and public health practitioners, to provide support for the fellows and encourage interchange of ideas and experiences beyond the cohort as a means for enhancing sustainability.¹³ Our goal was to create an experiential-learning, professional-development program that would enrich the teaching and learning of public health law by students and faculty, and hopefully would have a lasting national impact on the teaching of practice-based public health law.

Despite some challenges, this pilot fellowship program achieved its goals and has yielded rich lessons. What worked well? What were the challenges? How might things be done differently? What were critical components if this program or a variant were undertaken again? What do we see as the future for this form of higher-education professional development? What follows is a reflection on these questions based on conversations with the participants, their reports, our experiences over the course of the year-long fellowship program, and Kaufman's discussions and meeting observations undertaken as the program evaluator for RWJF and the program's quality-improvement efforts.

What Worked Well

Summer Institute

Virtually all of the participants said that the summer institute at Park City was a highlight and primary driver of success for the fellowship program. This intense, focused experience at the beginning of the fellowship year created rapid bonding and trust, allowing for self-reflection and sharing of concerns and ideas. As a result, fellows made significant adjustments in their project plans and left the institute energized, using the momentum coming out of the experience to push them ahead through barriers and challenges that occurred back home. Having the program model different forms of teaching stimulated fellows to incorporate new methods into their projects (e.g., externships, clinics, site visits, and hands-on projects with public health practitioners). The variation in participants' professional disciplines, practice experiences, and public health law teaching topics and methods created new insights and tools for fellows to use in carrying out their projects. The thoughtful planning of the agenda, along with the specially chosen location and demeanor of the program team, mentors, and other speakers and faculty, signaled to the fellows that they were valued as people beyond their teaching roles.

The fellows attributed the rapid formation of a community of practice and lasting professional relationships to these factors. Another important bonding factor noted by fellows and mentors was the experiential learning day spent at the National Ability Center, where all participants labored side by side in a service project (building a trail), challenge courses, and sensory experiences (working non-verbally with horses and dining blind-folded).¹⁴ Along with time for socializing in group meals off-site and recreational pursuits, the summer institute created a work hard/learn a lot/have fun atmosphere. As one fellow noted, “I have attended countless conferences, workshops, symposia, retreats, and professional development programs…. This fellowship was, and I suspect, will remain the most impactful of my career because of the sustained time learning together with so many guests and mentors during the summer institute that carried me through my project and the year.”¹⁵

Deans' Engagement

The requirement that the fellows' deans attend the summer institute had a number of underlying rationales. First, their presence signaled that they were personally invested in the success of their fellows. Second, the summer institute provided them with a “mental map” and understanding of the public health law field, both in academia and in society, which was not necessarily part of their own disciplinary backgrounds. For the public health and social work deans, they gained more awareness of the important role that law plays in promoting the public's health and its relevance for their graduate students. For many law deans, the institute represented their first in-depth exposure to the public health world, its role in social justice, and its opportunities for employment of law graduates; they particularly appreciated hearing from the practitioner roundtables about the jobs open to law graduates and the factors the public and private-sector agencies look for when hiring. Third, all deans could appreciate how much they had in common across disciplinary fields, particularly the value of and need for increased interdisciplinary and community-engaged learning opportunities for all of their students. As one dean said, “I now have one more concrete example I can point to for my philosophy of a contextualized, interdisciplinary, team approach to legal work. Also the project is sensitizing our faculty to law as a social determinant of health.”

Afterwards, fellows, mentors, and the deans themselves reflected on the importance of requiring their engagement.¹⁶ Bringing in the deans brought sage higher-education political expertise, credibility, and support to the fellows and program.

Professional Development Approach

Fellows reported developing professionally as teachers, both for their new public health law courses and for their other courses. Many described their fellowship experience as “transformational”: they gained confidence, learned to take risks, developed a richer knowledge base about public health and the real world of practice, enhanced relationship-building skills, learned to problem-solve through barriers (including reaching out to other colleagues for advice and support), and developed leadership skills. The confidential coaching sessions with the development coach were seen as particularly useful. One fellow reflected on the value of having the time and a close network of colleagues with whom to explore and brainstorm how to teach more effectively: “Most of the time our interactions with other faculty are related to discussing administrative matters, not how or even what we teach.… Teaching can be a relatively solitary process. Talking through the challenges as well as those moments when students ‘get it’ with this group has been one of the most important professional opportunities I have had.”

Community of Practice

All fellows reported using the community of practice extensively during the fellowship year and after. Begun at the summer institute, it was strengthened during the fellowship year by frequent calls and email exchanges, working on case studies and student assessment methods together, and exchanging course and clinic materials. It was also reinforced by in-person get-togethers and collaborative presentations at professional conferences during the year, by giving presentations at each other's schools, and by inviting onto their campuses other experts in public health law with whom they had connected through the program during the year.

Impact

Students

The students enrolled in the fellows' classes, extern-ships, and collaborations with health departments clearly benefited from the new methods of teaching. Some expressed amazement that public health law had not been taught in their school before. Many learned to approach problem-solving in interdisciplinary teams of law and public health students or through interacting with public health and community agencies as part of their course assignments, and some experienced learning across other disciplines (e.g., with social work, nursing, and medical students, and with professionals in urban planning and community development). The law students found inclusion of other professional students very helpful to their learning. Projects required students to practice interdisciplinary communication skills. Students also participated actively in generating course content and outcomes as faculty stepped back and let them lead.

Students saw how different areas of law (e.g., constitutional, civil rights, insurance, and even international laws) connect through the public health case studies and projects they worked on. They learned about policy processes and how coalitions are built and sustained. Most importantly, students realized that lawyers cannot create policy change alone and that more can be accomplished through interdisciplinary teams than solo-profession approaches. And several students expressed interest in pursuing careers in public health law.

Students' experiential learning was much different than learning approaches in other courses, and profoundly affected their thinking and skills. As one student reflected:

Prior to my enrollment in law school I was a police officer for 12 years.… I assumed that the best way to address a problem was head on; kick the door in and neutralize the threat.… As I was initially introduced to the [project — helping youth suffering from severe asthma], I attempted to apply my prior problem-solving technique…. I quickly found out that…every door I intended to knock down only led to another door, or worse yet a wall!… [I soon realized] that the problem of childhood asthma…is a multilayered issue requiring an organized effort from many people in the community.… I began to see that rather than being the hammer that smashes the door, I needed to step back and instead join the many cogs working together to solve this serious problem. I was excited to see ‘cogs’ like doctors, lawyers, social workers, and the…Mayor all working in unison. Participating [in this project] has been a highlight of my law school career and given me a new perspective on problem-solving and renewed hope in the ability of our community and its leaders to work together for the betterment of our future.

University

Deans noted the increasing interest from university leadership for creating practice-ready professionals who have experienced collaborating with community agencies, and they used their fellows' projects as examples of how their schools collaborate and engage with the community. Several deans reported improved relationships with their communities as a result of the fellowship, and a number are being highlighted by university administration in their communications to alumni, the community, and their boards of trustees.

Overall, deans demonstrated support for the fellowship and helped their fellows work through barriers. Several engaged other deans at their universities to sustain or broaden interdisciplinary learning and collaborations with communities. Communities are now approaching several of the law schools for help with other policy issues. Two deans and one fellow reported their participation in the fellowship raised their reputation in the field of health/public health law. One dean reflected on her faculty fellow's innovative use of new technology to make online materials readily available to the students throughout their externship experience with a public health organization, whenever the information becomes relevant and valuable: “This is a real innovation in teaching, which if we can manage to translate into legal pedagogy more broadly, would represent a real improvement to law teaching— which hasn't changed appreciably in a few centuries.”

Fellows

All fellows experimented with and incorporated experiential, practice-based learning into their teaching. The program, credibility of the RWJF fellow designation, attendance of deans during a portion of the summer institute, and the reputations of program leadership increased fellows' standing with their deans and among faculty peers. In some cases this visibility brought new assignments and requests from their schools or community partners, stretching limited time they had to commit to their fellowship projects even further. Fellows learned how to reach out and work with people new to them in the community, and learned to build relationships external to their schools and internally across the university. All fellows stepped “out of the box” of typical teaching and took risks, learning that thoughtful risk-taking brings rewards. All intend to incorporate new teaching methods and student experiences into their teaching more broadly.

All fellows stepped “out of the box” of typical teaching and took risks, learning that thoughtful risk-taking brings rewards. All intend to incorporate new teaching methods and student experiences into their teaching more broadly.

Fellows also benefitted from the program's nurturing of their capacities for self-reflection and professional growth. As one fellow reflected:

I've spent a significant amount of my education and career feeling “less than” I should be or barely “good enough.” Working with the folks in the fellowship program over the course of this year, I have had more than a handful of moments where I felt like I have actively moved projects and conversations forward because I was actually the right person, with the right skills and perspective, for the job or the question. It has been a tremendous joy working with a group of hard-working, smart folks who consciously look for and celebrate each others' strengths. I'd like to think I'm becoming one of those people.

Challenges and Recommendations

As with any pilot effort, the participants and program team faced significant challenges. We learned from these challenges and made adjustments along the way, where possible. The following section describes some of these challenges and our recommendations for addressing them.

Time Constraints

Fellows, deans, and mentors all mentioned the workload burden for the fellows on top of their other teaching and faculty duties. Few fellows received release time. The workload turned out to be much more than originally anticipated, often due to the difficulties they experienced in implementing new and cross-disciplinary courses and the burden imposed by the program in submitting progress reports and updates to their project plans and professional development journals, and participating in calls with mentors, the program lead, and the cohort. A timing crunch occurred when the fellows' final reports and the program's closing conference occurred at their busiest time of year — in May at the end of the semester and graduation — and before the final student evaluations were submitted. For some fellows, the 12-month fellowship period proved too short for designing and implementing all of the components of their project plans and getting them through university approval processes.

Recommendations: In retrospect, the fellowship program might have been improved by the following:

Providing a stipend to the fellows (or their schools) to buy out some teaching time for them during the fellowship year (e.g., a course release), perhaps matched in some portion by a time release commitment from their school for faculty service/committee work;

Extending the fellowship year by three to six months, to allow final reports and the closing conference to occur during the summer after the school year;

Limiting the fellows' written submissions to the program during the year and allowing more time to develop their projects' tangible products and teaching tools (like case studies and interdisciplinary assessment instruments); and

Allowing more flexibility in the timing and format of periodic conference calls and check-ins among the fellows, perhaps teaming up pairs of fellows rather than the entire cohort on these calls, and using pairs to do progress checks with each other as one way to reduce the number of written update progress reports.

Designing New Interdisciplinary Courses

Fellows with interdisciplinary projects sometimes faced significant administrative challenges beyond those experienced within just one school when creating a new course. Working with other professional schools having their own processes exacerbated complexities and lengthened time for approval — in one case, it took the entire fellowship year to accomplish the necessary interdisciplinary approvals and thus the course could be offered only at the fellow's own school during the fellowship year. Class calendaring also presented major barriers. Professional schools operate with different calendars and class schedules, complicating finding an overlap time when jointly-listed courses could be taught. Securing course approvals through different multiple schools revealed different requirements and credit-hour calculations for different professional schools.

Lack of student opportunities to take elective courses, due to the number of courses that may be required in a professional degree program, may limit enrollment in new public health law offerings. Law students may focus on courses felt to be related to passing the bar exam. Public health education accreditation requirements can leave room for few electives, creating challenges in establishing a multi-disciplinary learning environment.

University system reimbursement for teaching time also can create potential barriers to teaching on an interdisciplinary basis. Some fellows discovered that tuition dollars per credit enrolled went to the school the student was registered in, even if faculty from another school taught the course. Deans facing budget cuts and schools where faculty positions require income generation noted the issue would need resolution for course sustainability.

Several fellows based in law schools also faced faculty resistance. One fellow dealt with concerns that collaborating with other professions might interfere with lawyers exercising independent judgement. In a number of schools, faculty expressed concerns that the new courses might interfere with students' taking the courses required to pass bar exams.

The deans proved essential in negotiating solutions where barriers occurred.

Recommendations: As strong advocates of the benefits of interdisciplinary education, we would recommend the following measures to address the administrative burdens of implementing interdisciplinary courses and enrolling students from different disciplines:

Encouraging deans to acknowledge the benefits of interdisciplinary learning and to lead university efforts to accommodate interdisciplinary enrollments across their campuses;

Encouraging faculty who engage in interdisciplinary or community-engaged courses to share their experiences at informal gatherings of their faculty and administrations (as the fellows were required to do during the fellowship year);

Sharing best practices for how other schools address scheduling, credit hours, creating more elective slots, and tuition flow and reimbursement for interdisciplinary courses; and

Encouraging public health schools and their accreditation body to decrease required courses or otherwise allow more flexibility in program requirements in order to free up time for electives, such as public health law.

Demands on Students

Fellows discovered that teaching through group projects and working with community agencies on legal projects required more time commitment from students than traditional courses. A number of fellows cut back the assignments or restructured the complexity of them to fit student schedules and expectations. For group work and discussion, especially multi-disciplinary ones, more class time was needed, and coverage of assigned course materials had to be pared back. In the future some credit-hour increases may be needed to allow sufficient time for both coverage of subject-matter content and work on team-based projects.

Recommendations: Each of the fellows' projects was unique and new, so all were undertaken in the spirit of experimentation and some trial and error. We recommend that they, like all faculty teaching a new course for the first time:

Use their first pilot experience to refine their syllabi and adjust their coverage, expectations, and pacing;

Share with their community of practice a set of best-practice time estimates for various types of activities, both inside and outside of the classroom; and

Consider whether aspects of their course justify a request for an overall credit-hour increase or a different staging of components of their course, perhaps over two semesters.

Community Partnerships

While the projects with health departments and related community organizations produced many benefits for the students and their partner agencies, several challenges emerged. Engaging health departments in work with students often proved tricky, in that the departments were often short-staffed and the fellows did not want to create undue burden on department staff. Likewise, managing expectations of health department staff about the skill sets and time available from students became important so that the fellows did not disappoint new community partners.

Recommendations: For faculty who engage in practice-based learning with community partners, we recommend that they:

Discuss up-front their mutual interests and separate challenges, their own and their community partner's expectations of their respective roles and responsibilities, and the realities of student participation, and ensure that there is alignment of these understandings;

Manage expectations and track progress through periodic check-ins with partners and students; and

Intervene after students have encountered challenges or conflicts within their teams, insufficient guidance or unreasonable expectations from their community partner, or other problem that the students have tried but cannot solve on their own.

Relationship Building

Establishing an interdisciplinary course and practice-based experiences within community agencies requires navigating and cultivating a complex network of relationships. For some fellows, the time to create working relationships took longer than anticipated and, along with the numerous steps required for coordination, created frustrations. Within law schools, some fellows faced feelings from other faculty that their novel courses were not sufficiently related to helping students pass the bar exam. The deans facilitated connections for the fellows but allowed the fellows to take the lead in developing relationships and negotiating what they needed.

Recommendations: Looking back over the summer institute and fellowship program, we would recommend retaining some features and incorporating others to foster good skills and opportunities for building the constructive relationships needed for successful change in higher education, such as:

Retaining fellowship training on negotiation skills and organizational change theory, while increasing conflict-resolution training;

Retaining engagement of a professional coach with conflict-resolution and mediation experience to work one-on-one with fellows;

Retaining and encouraging greater dean involvement and participation in shaping and facilitating the fellow's proposed project;

Giving fellows a small fund with which to travel in their states to build relationships with public health practitioners and lawyers, and perhaps to hold a state meeting of those interested in public health law; and

Having project team members and consultants visit each fellow's university and use RWJF's name recognition to raise awareness across the university of the importance of public health law and the fellow's contributions to the field.

Taking Advantage of Mentoring

The mentors were five distinguished senior faculty members from law and public health schools, and were selected for the range of skills and attributes and the credibility and stature that they brought to the program, including subject-matter expertise, administrative experience, professional reputation, and commitment to the program and to supporting the fellows. The fellows reported that the mentors provided valuable coaching in how to address university administrative challenges, suggestions on dealing with resistance and barriers, and in many cases, curriculum design recommendations. Two mentors noted that they grew professionally as a result of participating and benefitted from the program as much as the fellows did.¹⁷ The faculty lead (Scott) found the mentors to be invaluable in providing ongoing constructive advice to her in shaping the program, guiding and intervening to help the fellows when needed, and supporting the goals of the program.

While the mentoring program was central to the fellowship program, in conversations with the program evaluator (Kaufman), fellows and mentors reflected somewhat mixed experience with it. Fellows and mentors independently suggested that some personality/style matches were not optimal, since mentoring is such a personal interaction experience. Mentors were used most often as sounding boards about how to handle challenges and less on the substance of the projects or teaching. Long-distance mentoring created challenges, and fellows and mentors felt inadequate in knowing how to take advantage of a long-distance relationship. A few fellows had difficulty reaching their mentors when they were most needed, and several did not routinely seek out their mentors. All fellows noted the benefit of having one-on-one confidential coaching calls with the professional development coach, who provided advice, modeled language suggestions for negotiating, and supplied relevant literature about relationship building.¹⁸

Recommendations: Good mentoring, feedback, and coaching skills have typically not been explicitly and systematically fostered as part of faculty members' professional development in law and other professional schools. In light of the fellows' experiences being mentored, it would be beneficial to use this cohort of fellows as mentors in any similar future fellowship program. In hindsight, the fellowship program might have been improved by:

More in-depth training for the mentors in good mentoring skills during or before the summer institute and increased stipend for mentors' participation in the fellowship program;

Training for the fellows on methods for using mentors constructively;

Having fellows and mentors develop mutual guidance for structuring their calls and making agreements on how much (and what kind of) substantive feedback on course materials and other project components or concerns was desired; and

Encouraging calls via Skype to enhance face time with each other, as there was consensus that in-person conversations were generally more effective than audio-only phone calls.

Program Administration

Just as the fellows had underestimated how much time and work would be involved in implementing their new projects, RWJF and the program team underestimated the amount of time and level of effort that were needed to simultaneously conduct a competitive application and selection process for the fellows while also planning the summer institute and program year. As one author (Scott) observed, “Planning a ten-day conference is like planning ten weddings.” All of the participants, including the program team, have personal and professional lives and responsibilities outside of the fellowship program, and being graciously accommodating of the inevitable curve balls (e.g., unexpected health, family, or job-related concerns) that everyone is going to be thrown at some point over the course of a year is as necessary to good program administration as having a solid structure within which to organize it.

Recommendations: To ensure careful advance planning, a clear structure and management system for the program, and good humor when the unexpected happens, we recommend retaining several measures that were adopted during this program's development:

Beginning with the end in mind — selecting the right program team (faculty, staff, consultants, and mentors) and setting out agreed-upon goals and desired outcomes at the outset, and then developing the activities to achieve them;

Designing the program evaluation instruments to measure success in achieving those specific goals and desired outcomes;

Clarifying what is expected of all program participants, either through conference calls or written memos outlining deliverables and timelines, and gently overseeing compliance; and

Remaining flexible in the face of challenges and being open to new opportunities, as both will inevitably arise during the course of any year-long program.

Critical Components for Success

We offer the following as the key components of the fellowship program that were unique to it and that were critical to its success:

Its focus on teaching rather than substantive content: By modeling different methods for teaching at the beginning of the program, it encouraged creativity and expanded skill sets that earned positive feedback from students, faculty colleagues, and the community.

Intensive, experiential-learning institute at the beginning of the program set the stage for new skills acquisition with appropriate pacing to both enhance reflection and allow for rapid bonding through group activities and fun social events.

Freedom to innovate, with support for taking risks: Innovation and community engagement was encouraged at the summer institute by, for example, including service learning, field visits to observe real-world public health practice, and healthy food service. Risk-taking was practiced and encouraged, with personal coaching and support from peers, mentors, the project team, and consultants throughout the fellowship year.

Establishing a community of practice: It was important both to foster this collegial community from the outset of the program in order to create trust and a support network for fellows that would encourage cooperation and creativity, and to nurture and expand it throughout the fellowship year and afterwards through the sharing of resources and jointly developed products, the creation of the online, publicly accessible libraries,¹⁹ and connections with other public health law experts and leaders nationally.

Emphasis on professional and leadership development through the provision of professional coaching services and mentor support and guidance. The fellowship program was purposefully designed with these components in mind, from its initial training at the summer institute, followed by opportunities for self-reflection, professional coaching, and mentoring feedback throughout the year.

Other factors that were important contributors to the success of the program included:

Leadership: The organizational capacity and experience of the whole program team, coupled with credibility, extraordinary passion for public health law, and commitment of the lead faculty/project director and deans' consultant, were noted by many participants as critical to the successes achieved. These leaders received strong support and participation from GSU's president and law school dean. As with many ventures, especially innovative ones, choosing leaders with “the right stuff” can be the difference between success and failure.

Engaging deans at the summer institute: The requirement that deans attend broadened their understanding of the importance of law in creating healthy communities and fostered bonding with their fellows, resulting in their support for innovation and guidance for organizational change and sustainability.

RWJF brand: The stature of RWJF as a national leader in public health added credibility and recognition for the fellows, deans, their schools, and the university — in many cases increasing their visibility and standing within the academy and the communities in which they are located. This standing helped pave the way for improving relationships and interactions internally and perhaps more importantly with communities, by replacing “ivory tower” stereotypes with real assistance and mutual ways to enhance professional education and community health.

Mix of fellows: The professional backgrounds, disciplines, and schools of the fellows brought interdisciplinary views to the program, enriching the content of training sessions and the community of practice. The broad range of project curricular innovations — from helping a health department meet accreditation, to researching a topic and making recommendations to a health department about a service it was considering regulating (tattoo parlors), to participating in a community-wide effort to reduce severe asthma in children, to establishing medical-legal partnership clinics — demonstrated ideas for future course activities among the fellows and engaged the fellows in helping each other based upon their own expertise.

Envisioning the Future

As fellows described it, the “gift” of the fellowship program was integrating substantive public health law with best teaching practices, experiential learning skills, relationship building, and personal development. It has had profound impact on the fellows and changed their visions and tool boxes as teachers and spilled over beyond the boundaries of a one-year program.

Sustainability of these efforts remains a question; yet, we remain optimistic. Certainly all of the fellows' projects illustrate advances in the kinds of curriculum reforms advocated by the Carnegie Foundation Report²⁰ and reflected in new ABA accreditation standards for law schools.²¹ Many of the deans already have moved ahead with ideas to sustain or expand multidisciplinary and practice-based teaching. Building strong internal and external relationships and a network of colleagues to call on provides additional support for continuing these higher-education innovations, or creating even better ones.

Sustainability and spread of innovations requires telling the stories of the experiences and results in a compelling way. We encourage the fellows and their schools and universities to partner with their community collaborators to continue to create a record of what happened in their projects and thereafter, and to use numerous media for communicating these results.

If our nation is to build a “culture of health,” as RWJF encourages us to do,²² we must prepare professionals to understand and work alongside each other and their communities, as part of the community solution to complex issues. Higher education currently is not yet fully prepared to take on this challenge and bring down its siloed walls. We hope this fellowship program and others pave the way towards achieving this goal.

References

Kaufman ,

Allan , and

Ibrahim , “Using Public Health Legal Counsel Effectively: Beliefs, Barriers and Opportunities for Training,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 41, no. 1, Supp. (2013): 61–64.

For identification of the program team, see note 12 in

Scott

, “Transforming the Future of Public Health Law Education through a Faculty Fellowship Program,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 44, no. 1, Supp. (2016): 6-17. The fellows and mentors are identified in notes 14 (fellows) and 19 (mentors) of that article.

The summer institute agenda can be accessed at <http://clhs.law.gsu.edu/files/2014/03/agenda-detailed-final-7-7-14.pdf> (last visited January 21, 2016).

M. S.

Knowles ,

E. F.

Holton III , and

R. A.

Swanson , The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development, 8th ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).

Id., at 43–44.

Id., at 44.

Id., at 44–45.

For a description of these formats during the summer institute, see Scott, supra note 2 and

Hoffmann

, “The Importance of Including the Deans,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 44, no. 1, Supp. (2016): 81–86.

Knowles et al., supra note 4, at 45–46.

10.

Id., at 46–47.

11.

Id. at 47.

12.

Id., at 30-32, 244–247.

13.

See Scott, supra note 2, at notes 6-7 and accompanying text and the discussion of the concept of “community of practice” and its benefits in the fellowship program.

14.

Id., at note 24 and accompanying text (discussion of program at National Ability Center).

15.

The original sources from which the quotes in this essay are excerpted are on file with the authors. Permission has been granted to reproduce these quotes in this essay.

16.

For a full discussion of the importance of including the deans in the faculty fellowship program, see Hoffmann, supra note 8.

17.

See

Crossley and

Silverman , “Reflections on Mentoring,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 44, no. 1, Supp. (2016): 76–80.

18.

For a discussion of the professional coaching offered during the fellowship program and its underlying rationales, see

Gerardi

, “Polishing the Apple: A Holistic Approach to Developing Public Health Law Educators as Leaders of Change,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 44, no. 1, Supp. (2016): 87–92.

19.

For a discussion of these libraries, see

S. P.

Kershner

, “Best Practices for Teaching Public Health Law: Two Online Resource Libraries,” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 44, no. 1, Supp. (2016): 93-96. Data on the nationwide faculty usage of these libraries are not yet available, and so as noted in this essay, “[t]o ensure the future of the online libraries developed through the fellowship program, faculty who find the materials beneficial will need to continue to access the materials, provide feedback, and contribute materials for others to access.” Id. See Georgia State University College of Law Library, “Public Health Law Research Guide,” available at <http://libguides.law.gsu.edu/PublicHealthLaw> (last visited January 22, 2016); Network for Public Health Law, “Public Health Law Faculty Teaching Resources,” available at <https://www.networkforphl.org/faculty_teaching_resources/> (last visited January 22, 2016) (this site is password protected; faculty may request a password from the Network on the site).

20.

W. M.

Sullivan ,

Colby ,

J. W.

Wegner ,

Bond , and

L. S.

Shulman , Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), at 87-161 (reporting the results of a study of legal education supported by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and recommending that law schools build “bridges to practice” and provide more emphasis on students’ development of lawyering skills and professional identity and ethics).

21.

The ABA’s new accreditation standards for law schools includes a requirement that they offer “one or more experiential course(s) totaling at least six credit hours. An experiential course must be a simulation course, a law clinic, or a field placement. To satisfy this requirement, a course must be primarily experiential in nature and must: (i) integrate doctrine, theory, skills, and legal ethics, and engage students in performance of one or more of the professional skills identified in Standard 302; (ii) develop the concepts underlying the professional skills being taught; (iii) provide multiple opportunities for performance; and (iv) provide opportunities for self-evaluation.” See American Bar Association, 2015-2016 Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, Chapter 3, Program of Legal Education, Standard 303(a)(3), available at <http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/misc/legal_education/Standards/2015_2016_chapter_3.authcheckdam.pdf> (last visited January 22, 2016). Most of the fellows had projects, or components thereof to be developed in the future, that would satisfy this standard.

22.

See Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “Building a Culture of Health,” available at <http://www.rwjf.org/en/library/annual-reports/presidents-message-2014.html> (last visited January 22, 2016).